Guest post by Bruce Anderson, general manager, IBM Global Electronics Industry, and Scott Burnett, director, IBM Digital Convergence Group
IBM believes a “smarter home” is on the horizon. The increasing number of web-enabled home appliances and devices, coupled with the widespread availability of broadband communications, are finally enabling new “intelligent” products and services that reach far beyond traditional markets. Today’s internet of people is evolving into an “internet of things”, as soon there will be more than one trillion connected devices. By 2013, 1.2 billion connected consumer electronics devices are expected in the more than 800 million homes with broadband connections.
Compared with previous attempts to enable the “smart home,” where the intelligence was based on centralized control through a home server or gateway, the intelligence and with it the complexity in the new smarter home is moved out from the home onto the network, or more precisely the internet cloud.
This new paradigm exposes opportunities for innovative services which leverage the computational power and scalability of the cloud, as well as the collective consumer knowledge. Data which is aggregated then stored within the cloud can provide dramatic new insights about consumer needs and behavior. Ultimately, this paradigm facilitates a host of possibilities, from radically improving the performance of current devices and services, to delivering benefits which have not yet even been considered. The current smarter home services areas showing early adoption are:
• Entertainment & convenience
• Energy management
• Safety & security
• Health & wellness
Many consumers are already using cloud computing and may not realize it. Anyone who has a web-based email account from Google or Yahoo! or has ever used YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter, has already interacted with data stored in the cloud. With cloud computing, consumers do not need to have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the cloud that supports their consumer electronics.
A common services delivery platform based on industry standards supports cooperative interconnection and creation of new services. Implementation inside the cloud enables quick development of services at lower cost, with shorter time to market, facilitating rapid experimentation and improvement. The emergence of cloud computing, web services, and service-oriented architecture, together with new standards, is the key that will open up the field for the new smarter home services.
